User blog:Samuli.seppanen/Routledge Open Access week
Routledge is having an open access week. This is of particular interest because there are some ballista articles in there. In particular the Performance of Greek–Roman Artillery by Rossi et al 2015 is extremely interesting. After the open access week is gone, that article probably goes back behind a paywall. Because this is a blog, and in blogs one is allowed to rant, I will take this oppurtunity to rant about these paywall-erecting publishers. Take the article "The Reorganization of the Defences of Romano-British Towns in the Fourth Century" for example. It contains the word "ballista" in it, because it shows up in the site search. However, there is probably no way to know if the article is actually relevant to ballista research in any way. Moreover, the original article was published in 1955, and it was put online in 2014 as a rather crude scanned copy. And now they have the nerve to ask 129€ for the entire publication, or 33€ for this one article. This is just ridiculous, is inherently opposed to the idea of disseminating scientific research as far as possible as fast as possible. Which is what science should be about - sharing information and working on it together. I can reluctantly pay the 30€ from my own pocket if I'm 100% sure the article is relevant to my research, and I don't have any other options for obtaining it. However, I won't pay 30€ for an article that might be somewhat useful, if I'm lucky. Continuing on, these publishers are, in my opinion, a remnant from an age when you actually did need a publisher to publish your articles. Nowadays I would go as far as call them leeches, because the amount of work they put into making the publications has little correlation with what they charge for them. The only add-on value these publishers add (afaics) is peer review, but that could be easily organized without them in a peer to peer fashion. Of course, if you're lucky, your University is paying the ransoms already, so you might not have this "no access, pay up" problem. But whose benefit it is to exclude access to scientific knowledge? Does anyone else benefit, besides the entity that holds the keys to the content? My answer is: nobody. While these Open Access weeks are nice, they're really just a symptom that the content should just be opened up, not kept behind closed doors and a tollbooth. I have such "strong" opinion on this matter, because I have a dual background: on one hand, I have two university degrees, a MA in archaeology, and a bachelor in ICT, and on other hand I've worked in open source and open content communities for years. In the latter communities it is the norm to share all information and work on common projects remotely over the Internet - a model which allows the Internet to exist. Without open source ideology and the associated practical development processes, we'd all probably be using Microsoft Network and the humanity would be set back 20 years. EDIT: It looks like the "Performance of Greek–Roman Artillery" was the only useful, new article there was. The rest I had either downloaded last year or earlier, or had proven not to be particularly useful. Category:Blog posts Category:Backup